In our Friday newsletter we recap the biggest news story of the week to make sure you don’t miss out on the latest trends, developments, and acquisitions in digital health. In case you missed it (ICYMI), this round-up will catch you up on the top stories from the past month.
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#1 Story: What top 30 pharma thinks about SaMD - a BrightInsight and HealthXL Collaboration
The Story: In partnership with HealthXL, BrightInsight recently surveyed the pharma industry about Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), interviewed top digital health leaders and analyzed publicly available data for the top 30 firms over a nearly three-year period. The analysis revealed that disease management is a key use case for SaMD, the time and cost to market much greater than originally anticipated, and strategic partnerships may be the way forward for pharma initiatives.
Why it’s Notable:
- The SaMD market is growing. Between January 2019 and October 2021, the top five pharma companies invested a combined $270 million in SaMD initiatives.
- Strategic partnerships have been a strong strategy for pharma companies in terms of SaMD solutions, with 73% of analyzed deals falling within this space.
- 61% of experts interviewed believed disease management is the most promising use case for SaMD with patient adherence (15%) and patient diagnosis (15%) following as the second and third most promising.
Industry Implications:
- Implementing SaMD initiatives is taking pharma much longer than expected (nearly three times as long). In addition to time, the cost to bring a SaMD to market was five times more than expected. There are still a lot of learnings for pharma in terms of what it actually takes to bring an SaMD to market.
- To reduce the cost and time to market we will likely see pharma continue to partner with existing solutions rather than build their own. However, these solutions will need to be configurable and customizable to meet specific pharma use cases.
Read the full article here
In other news…
#2 Story Snapshot: GSK and PathAI Partner to Accelerate AI Drug Discovery
The story: GSK has partnered with PathAI for a multiyear agreement to advance clinical trials and AI drug discovery and development in oncology and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). The partnership will incorporate PathAI’s expertise and AI models into GSK’s existing proprietary AI models in order to improve the delivery and development of treatment options for people with cancer and NASH.
Get the full story here
#3 Story Snapshot: Blue Spark Technologies offers up IP to secure $40M funding
The story: Blue Spark Technologies has raised $40M to advance their remote patient monitoring solutions including TempTraq, a body temperature monitoring patch. The $40M in funding came from an intellectual property-based debt solution. In this scenario the company’s IP is used as collateral for the loan. Ghost Tree Partners led the funding round with support from Aon.
Get the full story here
